Habari zenu? How are you all?
As I count down my last 3.5 days in Africa for the year, I can’t help but get butterflies as I gear up to finish all my last papers and presentations before flying out on Saturday. Four flights later, I’ll arrive in Chicago and then it’s back to Wisconsin! So until I get home, there will be no more blog updates to catch you up. After five exams and three papers in the last three weeks, I am ready to be done. I have no doubt that one week after I’m home I will think “okay, this is all well and good, but I’m ready to go back to Africa sasa hivi (right now)”. Before I leave you for a few days, I wanted to leave you with two parting stories that I think show the difference in our cultures pretty well.
The first occurred when I went to bibi’s house (remember the sour milk porriage?). One of bibi’s daughters came to the boma with her baby child and when she started to come in, the baby saw me. Upon laying eyes on the mzungu, me, the child immediately started screaming at the top of its lungs. It was genuinely petrified of me because of my white skin. So naturally bibi and her daughters thought that the only thing to do was to acclimate the child to seeing white people right then and there. They calmly passed the screaming child into the boma and sat in on my lap where it proceeded to wail. Bibi’s daughter ended up going home with the baby to calm it down. It is definitely a new experience being in a place where you are not only the minority, you are an exotic entity akin to a ghost or something that you see in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. For the first time in my life, I have been self-conscious of my skin color.
The second interesting story happened when I went to Kariakoo, an area in the middle of Dar where there is a huge market area, to browse and relax after my human evolution final. Just minutes after stepping off the dala dala into this busy part of town, we saw a man running for his life - literally, though. He had a crazed look in his eye, one of sorrow and sheer terror, but also adrenaline. He was being chased by an irate-looking man and two other men, one with a whistle, and all three yelling ‘mwizi’ at the top of their lungs. A mwizi is a thief. They told us at the beginning of our stay here not to yell ‘mwizi’ unless we were absolutely certain of the person that had taken our stuff. They said that it was because people would get killed - i.e. the thief. But that’s not all that they do to a thief. If the people tracking down the thief in Kariakoo would have caught him, they would have done vigilante justice to the tune of either a. taking an old tire, filling it up with gasoline, putting it around the thief’s neck and then lighting it on fire, or b. if a tire isn’t available, they just pour the petrol directly onto the thief and light it on fire. It’s not like the thieves don’t know what will happen to them if they steal. They know. Food for thought: think of how desperate a thief must be to get money to either feed his family or whatnot if he is willing to risk getting either lit on fire or killed. Makes you think.
That’s all for now, folks. Tutaonana nitaporudi Marekani!
(We’ll see each other when I return to America).
